India’s third biggest software firm, Wipro, plans to achieve $1 billion in revenues by selling hydraulic cylinders and manufacturing components for aviation and defense contractors in around 3-4 years, as the company seeks to grow its portfolio beyond software.

Having restructured its software exports business, Wipro’s infrastructure engineering division, which contributes less than 10 percent of the group’s business, has identified Brazil and China as new manufacturing hubs for its hydraulics business.

The company has also received regulatory approvals for setting up its defense manufacturing unit at Devanahalli on the outskirts of Bangalore.

“We want to more than treble our cylinder manufacturing capacity and flesh out a more focused strategy for addressing the lucrative defense offset market,” said Pratik Kumar, who now heads Wipro’s infrastructure engineering division.

Wipro, which counts the world’s biggest maker of construction equipment Caterpillar among its top customers, set up its ninth manufacturing unit at Wujin hi-tech industrial zone in Changzou, China, last year. The company is now preparing to set up another unit in Brazil sometime this year.

“We are exploring both Greenfield and acquisition route to expand in Brazil, it’s an opportunity we cannot afford to get late in addressing,” said Kumar. “The economy is growing 7-8,percent, and with the Olympics ahead, prospects are looking bright,” he added.

Experts say Wipro’s diversified business helps it steer through economic downturns more effectively, but the company needs to ensure that it picks the right bets. “Wipro’s biggest strength is its soaps-to-software positioning, but our concern is that it should not spread too thin,” said an analyst at a Mumbai-based brokerage firm who tracks the company.

BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion, which is under pressure to provide access to its corporate email services to Indian security agencies, has accused competitors of trying to profit from its problems in India by "suggesting or implying" that the Canadian company was being singled out by Indian authorities.

RIM has said that its rivals would face the same problems over security in India, and has named Nokia, Motorola, Apple, Sony Ericsson, HTC, Cisco, Google, HP, Microsoft, Samsung and Good Technology as companies offering services using similar encryption technologies. The Indian government had earlier said it would act against companies such as Google and Skype on encryption, but has so far not acted on it.

The Canada-based smartphone maker reiterated its earlier stance that draconian measures would impact India's economic development and added that encryption was vital for wooing and retaining businesses here, especially outsourcing and BPOs.

The RIM, in a customer update, said that it had been "assured by senior Indian government officials that it would not be singled out, and that any policy relating to 'lawful access' requirements for encrypted enterprise or VPN (virtual private network) communications would be applied 'equitably' to all products and services that use encryption in India."

"Some of RIM's competitors have attempted to compound and profit from the confusion by suggesting or implying that RIM's BlackBerry Enterprise Server software will be singled out by Indian regulators," the company said in the e-mailed statement.

Mobile handset manufacturer Nokia has entered into a partnership with telecom service provider Reliance Communications to provide exclusive access to Nokia's Ovi Store.

Reliance Communications consumers can now exclusively access the plethora of paid-for content available on the Ovi Store, through integrated operator billing, for a three month period, the company said in a statement.

The amount will be either included in their monthly mobile phone bills or deducted from the pre-paid balance, as per their data plans.

The Ovi Store supports the widest range of content and file types including applications, games, videos, podcasts, productivity tools, web and location-based services and much more.

Allaying privacy fears surrounding “Aadhar,” Unique Identification Authority of India chairman Nandan Nilekani has said the project would in no way put at risk citizens' security and rights.

Delivering a lecture on “Analyzing and Envisioning India,” Nilekani said having an Aadhar number in no way puts the resident in a security risk or intrudes privacy.

"The data collected of the individual by means of biometric system will only be for the sake of their identification and access to other facilities like availing bank loans, being part of the PDS system and others. There is no way of other agencies or non-concerned parties having access to the Aadhar data base," Nilekani said.

He said if anybody wanted to misuse personal information about people then they could do it even now as most information about people is already available with numerous agencies like banks, post offices, internet etc.

He asserted that the 12-digit Aadhar number will not have much personalized information about the resident for anyone to misuse.

UIDAI has issued close to 2 million Aadhaar numbers and targets to touch the 600 million mark by 2014.
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